(About video games.)

For a medium that’s been around for a good 35 years at this point there are surprisingly few books that do a good job of exploring the various facets of videogame history. I’ve always found this a little bit odd; modern videogaming has found itself inextricably linked with the rise of the internet and so you’re far more likely to find retrospectives on games and developers somewhere online, but the catch here is that anything published on the internet is going to be 1) superficial by its very nature (and I don’t mean that as a slight at all, it’s just that the amount of effort you’re going to put into researching even a long blog post or news article is always going to pale in comparison to what you’d do for a full-on book¹), and 2) distressingly hard to find unless it’s got really good search engine optimisation. No, I much prefer the old-fashioned approach of sitting down with a book that’ll do an in-depth exploration of one specific area, even if the authors can’t seem to resist giving them cliche titles like Game Over or Insert Coin; the act of reading a book has a permanence that scrolling down a webpage lacks and which leads to my assimilating the information far more readily, and as I like reading history books in general I’ve ended up reading rather more books about the history of video games than a normal person should. As I’ve hit something of a slow period when it comes to writing about games, I thought I’d change things up slightly by writing about writing about games instead. Here are a few books that I liked (or didn’t), and why.

Replay: The History Of Video Games

I tend to stay away from general histories of videogames these days, for one simple reason: I’ve been an interested observer for twenty years now, and I have an excellent (some would say freakish) memory. I already know the general history of videogames from the SNES/Genesis/PC era onwards since I was there the first time around, so there’s not much for me to get out of somebody else’s account and I usually prefer a more in-depth look at the bits that might have escaped my notice the first time around. Replay is the one exception I’d make to that rule and the only general history of the subject I’ve read that I’ve actually kept on my bookshelf, as it is meticulously well-researched and does take the time to pay a quick visit one or two areas I’d previously had little knowledge of, such as the French and Dutch development scenes of the ‘80s. For the rest, well, it is a sweeping history of (at the time) 30 years of gaming packed into 450 pages so it does end up being a little bit broad and imprecise in places, but it’s dense enough that it can afford to explore the key areas in a pleasing amount of detail. I might not recommend it as a starting point to somebody who was completely new to the hobby, but let’s face it: if you’re thinking about reading Replay you already have more than a passing interest in video games, and for that sort of person it’s an ideal window into the past that’s almost certain to have something in it you didn’t know about before.

Bitmap Brothers: Universe

I’m always a little suspicious of Kickstarted projects like this. The sort of person who is willing to spend over a year profiling a relatively localised area of gaming history such as the Bitmap Brothers² — and who makes a Kickstarter in order to fund it — tends to also overlap with another part of this Venn diagram labelled “rabid fan”. When coupled with the blarney-tinged recollections of events that occurred decades ago it’s the sort of thing that has a significant chance of turning into a hagiography of the subject matter. Bitmap Brothers: Universe does flirt with that line a little bit, as everyone who worked at the Bitmap Brothers at any time is portrayed as a flawed genius — but at least it did include the flaws. Otherwise this is a perfectly serviceable history of the Bitmaps before, during and after the glory years of Britsoft; this is a period that’s always held a certain amount of retrospective fascination for me as I was too young to appreciate the talent behind the games I was playing at that time. The general story is a familar one: the Bitmap development style was perfectly suited to the baroque environment of the Amiga, but the Bitmaps failed to change with the times, made the leap to PC a couple of years too late, and were eventually undone by spiralling development costs and a general unfamiliarity with 3D graphics. The flavour is new, though, particularly the details of what it was like to be a developer in Britain during the late 80s/early 90s when cutting-edge games could still (mostly) be cranked out by one or two people. The book’s biggest drawback is its price: it is formatted and priced like an art book at £30, making it a rather expensive prospect for anyone who isn’t already intimately interested in the subject area.

Prince Of Persia Diaries

Extracts from Jordan Mechner’s diaries covering the five-ish years of his life that he spent developing Prince Of Persia from concept to finished, released product. Mechner was just 21 years old when he started working on it, but his previous success with Karateka put him in a strong position when negotiating with Broderbund for a deal to publish Prince and he ended up with a ridiculous amount of control over the project for somebody so young — the flipside, of course, being that he had to do almost everything that wasn’t physically publishing the game himself. As these are personal diaries they’re very light on technical detail bar some brief descriptions of the rotoscoping and the entry where he realises that the Apple 2 — the primary development platform — is all but dead and that success of Prince is reliant on what he considers to be a somewhat dodgy port to IBM PC, but the overly navel-gazing nature of it still gives you a fascinating look into how much willpower it takes to push along something like Prince all on your own; there are periods in the diaries when Mechner gets so sick of it he doesn’t work on the game for months, preferring instead to concentrate on what he considers to be the far more respectable prospect of trying to break into Hollywood scriptwriting.

Which explains a lot; Prince Of Persia is pretty much exactly the sort of game I’d expect a film student to make.  Mechner is very aware that the younger version of him is a bit of an idiot in some respects but has resisted the temptation to over-edit the diary entries, ensuring that this account of his struggle with Prince is fittingly raw and personal. There’s a matching set of diaries covering Karetaka, which is also a good if less immediately compelling read, but the interesting thing about the Prince diaries is that there’s an entry where he gets the idea for flawed classic The Last Express. I’ve been hoping since 2012 that Mechner would release diaries revealing the story behind it, but it’s been five years now and I’ll just have to assume the development and subsequent commercial failure of The Last Express (Broderbund imploded about three months after it was released and the game was yanked from stores) was painful enough that he doesn’t want to publicise it. Which I can hardly blame him for.

Service Games: The Rise And Fall Of Sega

Now, you know the rabid fans I mentioned earlier? This similarly-Kickstarted account of Sega’s early 90s tussle with Nintendo and subsequent fall from grace was definitely written by a Sega fan as it is unashamedly one-sided, although not quite in the way I expected. The fanboying is almost entirely directed at Sega of America, whom the book credits with every single piece of success the company had outside of Japan; the later downward trajectory the company took before cratering deep into the Earth’s crust with the Saturn and Dreamcast is blamed entirely on Sega’s Japanese HQ becoming jealous and stripping their North American subsidiary of all decision making power. Doubtless there is a kernel of truth to this as the marketing accompanying the Genesis’s insurgent run against the SNES had a decidedly Western bent to it, but the book is mostly based on interviews with the NA staff of Sega at the time with absolutely no critical eye given to any potential whitewashing they might be attempting to apply to the narrative. Still, it’s not like the book doesn’t do enough of that on its own: did you know the Dreamcast was intended to fail all along, and that said vastly expensive failure was merely supposed to allow the company to exit the console market on a higher high than the Saturn? I certainly didn’t, and it’s not a theory I’ve seen advanced anywhere outside of this book. Which, incidentally, is the one book on this list you could easily afford to miss; it’s got some value as a collection of first-hand accounts if you’re used to reading history (and thus have plentiful experience parsing biased sources), but otherwise it’s far too stodgy and partisan to be worthwhile.

Masters Of Doom

If you prioritise sheer entertainment value over all other concerns when reading history, then you should definitely consider reading Masters Of Doom. It’s a pop-history account of id software’s glory years, starting with the initial meeting of the key players at ‘80s software magazine Softdisk, their formation of id and initial success with Wolfenstein 3D and the first Doom, and extending all the way through to John Romero’s high-profile split from the company and the launch – and subsequent descent into farce – of Ion Storm. Much of the latter subject has already been documented in painstaking detail on the contemporary web and in numerous retrospectives since, but having it all in one place plus some extra detail really brings home just how insanely dysfunctional Ion Storm was³; the deal they made with Eidos is a great example of a publisher being screwed over by a developer rather than the other way around. Although it does find time for plenty of interesting anecdotes the bulk of the book focuses overwhelmingly on the relationship between John Romero’s expansive visions and John Carmack’s introverted brilliance, both of which are portrayed in painstaking detail but — and this would be my one serious criticism of the book — without much nuance, leading to both of them feeling more like caricatures than real people. Still, the ‘90s really was full of those larger-than-life characters (as is Masters Of Doom) so it might not be too far off the mark, and if you want your history to tell a good story you can’t go wrong with Masters Of Doom. There’s a non-zero percentage of it that I’m decently sure is pure fiction (or at least extremely embellished truth) as the author has focused on building a narrative over getting absolutely everything right, but it’s accurate enough to be an immensely entertaining read because of this.

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I’m writing this review of Doom on a sunny Sunday probably less than 24 hours before the gaming sites get their own reviews up. I don’t know exactly what they’re going to say, but I predict they’re going to be fairly surprised at Doom’s proof that id Software do still know how to make a cracking FPS. I know I certainly was.

Honestly, if anything is to blame for that surprise it’s a combination of Rage being extremely tepid and Bethesda’s marketing department targeting all of the pre-release coverage of Doom at the CoD-devouring masses. It didn’t look great. The multiplayer beta made it look even worse – it moved clunkily, sounded awful, and just generally felt wrong, like they’d tried to turn Doom into an off-brand version of Halo. Fortunately for Doom the multiplayer was handled by a completely separate developer and can probably be consigned to the dustbin of history; the single-player has been developed solely by id Software — and despite their dwindling pedigree, there were a few lonely islands of promise in Rage’s ocean of mediocrity that indicated their talent wasn’t entirely dead. From the way Doom is structured I also think they’ve taken a long hard look at what fellow Bethesda stable-mates Machine Games did with Wolfenstein: The New Order, as the general approach Doom takes is almost identical; it fuses modern metagaming elements and quality-of-life features with core gameplay that feels retro, but which is so responsive and polished that it can only have come out of years of experimenting with how to update that gameplay for the modern era.

As with all Dooms before it, Doom is set on a Martian base that’s currently suffering the predations of a demonic invasion launched from Hell. And as with all Dooms before it, Doom’s plot is largely disposable gumpf, albeit somewhat self-aware gumpf that has a subtle sense of humour about it. For the most part it manages to avoid intruding on the actual gameplay; this does make the 3-4 “cutscenes” where you’re forced to put your gun away and listen to one of the two non-Doomguy characters in the game monologue at you all the more jarring and I’d rather they weren’t in the game at all, but the reason they’re so noticeable is because they’re so at odds with the rest of the game, which is the most arcade-y shooter I’ve played since Bulletstorm. It feels like a good update of classic Doom, mixing up frantic battles where a horde of demons chases you around the room while you try desperately not to die with quieter episodes where you explore in the name of finding secrets and easter eggs. The fights actually put me in mind of the excellent Devil Daggers for how fast and action-packed they are, which is appropriate since Devil Daggers was itself inspired by Doom.

A typical Doom level is laid out thusly: you proceed in a more-or-less linear fashion through the map, disposing of a basic background level of monsters on the way, until you reach a big room that’s laid out like a classic deathmatch area, with lots of raised platforms and nooks and crannies full of ammo and supplies, as well as a powerup or two. Sometimes there’ll be an extremely prominent button for you to push or an item for your to pick up, but just as often you’ll have no warning before the doors slam shut and demonic beasties start warping in. Doom’s enemies are almost entirely comprised of returning favourites from the originals — Imps, Hell Knights, Pinkies, Revenants, Mancubus…es — and while many of them do have projectile attacks that you have to dodge (they don’t get any hitscan weapons, so you always have a chance of dodging) they all love to get up close and personal. You also love to get up close and personal with the new Glory Kills mechanic, but only when you’ve staggered an enemy by reducing them to near-death; otherwise it’s backpedal o’clock while you fire a selection of extremely meaty guns at the encroaching enemy horde.

I was a little bit worried about Doom’s guns after enduring the multiplayer beta, but each of its nine weapons is really fun to use and gets a thorough workout throughout the entire game. There’s no magazines to reload and only two weapons have scopes you can sight down (these are rarely used because staying still in Doom is death), so the R key and right mouse button are instead reserved for switching between and using each weapon’s alternate fire modes. Each gun has two, and they’re unlocked by finding powerup drones hidden in particularly inaccessible places on the map; these alternate fire modes are a mechanic that’s been stolen wholesale from Rage, but that’s fine because it was the one part of Rage that worked, and it worked really well. It is if anything even better in Doom, with each fire mode ensuring a gun retains usability and versatility throughout the game. For example, there are two shotguns in the game: a bog standard combat shotgun you pick up in the tutorial, and the classic double-barrelled Super Shotgun you can get 4-5 levels in. The Super Shotgun would ordinarily make the combat shotgun irrelevant, but it’s saved by one of its alternate fire modes turning it into a grenade launcher. The Plasma Rifle gives you a choice of firing a stun pulse or a wave of superheated plasma in a wide arc. The Rocket Launcher can either lock on to an enemy and fire a volley of three rockets, or else have its rockets detonated mid-flight for a far more powerful explosion; this is particularly good for hitting enemies floating in mid-air such as the Cacodemon.  The Gauss Rifle has a Siege Mode, which is heavy on the ammo and takes a little while to charge, but which fires a single hugely powerful blast that’ll penetrate through multiple enemies and which will kill a Baron of Hell in two shots.

It’s Doom’s treatment of series classic weapons the BFG and the Chainsaw that’s probably the most interesting change here, though. These aren’t accessed via the number keys like normal weapons, but instead have their own dedicated keys for activation. This is because they function more like one-shot powers in a shoot ‘em up; the BFG is basically a smart bomb that’ll clear out all baddies standing in front of you, while the chainsaw will instantly kill any single enemy and cause them to drop a ton of ammo. Both of them function as get-out-of-jail-free cards for using in a jam; the chainsaw is designed to be used when you’re running low on ammo so that you can refill and get back in the fight, and the BFG is a panic button to be used when you’re facing overwhelming odds.  Each of them has a very limited number of uses and a very limited number of refills during a level, so you have to choose the moment to use them with care.

A typical battle in Doom has you switching between 3-5 weapons very very quickly according to the situation. Aside from the rocket launcher there’s no weapon that really functions as a one-size-fits-all; they’re all useful in different situations and so you find yourself switching from the Heavy Assault Rifle for sniping Imps to the Gauss Rifle for eliminating a tough target like a Mancubus to the Super Shotgun for the point-blank disposal of a Pinky. You use every aspect of the room to its fullest; Doom’s protagonist now has added mobility thanks to a double jump and the ability to mantle platforms, and you have to use all of it as you keep moving, moving, moving around the room, sprinting down corridors and leaping off ledges while taking out any monsters that cross your path. More stuff will spawn in as you finish off the first wave, and most of these arena encounters slowly scale up their monsters as the fight progresses, starting off with Imps and Possessed Soldiers mixed in with the odd tough enemy like a Mancubus, moving on to multiple Revenant and Hell Knight spawns and then finishing with something appropriately huge like a Baron of Hell. The big monsters function as an appropriate crescendo for a fight that’s been going on for a good 3-4 mayhem-packed minutes, and once they’re down it’s time to take stock of what’s left of the room, pick up any ammo/health that you missed and move on to the next arena.

Or you could hunt for secrets. This was a big element of classic Doom, and it’s one that’s been fully embraced for this update. I said earlier that the levels were more-or-less linear, and there are; there’s usually only one way forward and the trick is in figuring out what it is. If they’re linear, though, they are at least interestingly linear, making good use of the third dimension and sometimes backtracking over themselves several times. This three-dimensionality is supported by an updated automap system that is honestly the absolute best implementation they could have come up with, as it both shows you where to go and shows off how intricate the geometry of the level is. Often there’ll be an area shown on the automap that you didn’t visit in the course of travelling through the level; you’ve got fairly decent odds on there being a secret of some sort located here. At other times Doom pulls the classic Doom trick of showing you the secret through a window or a gap in the wall or up on a high ledge somewhere, and leaving you to figure out how to get to it. They’re usually cunningly well-hidden despite these hints, and so secret hunting both carries the inherent satisfaction of solving a puzzle and the more tangible reward of whatever the secret contained. A lot of the time this is armour, or a powerup – useful, to be sure, but nothing particularly out-of-the-ordinary — but sometimes it’s a gun that wouldn’t normally unlock until a level or two down the road — once again, hiding powerful weapons in the early levels was something that original Doom loved to do, and new Doom is no different. There’s also a selection of classic levels to be unlocked, and these are by far the hardest secrets to locate as they’re activated by levers that blend into the background geometry of the level and which don’t have the normal helper glow that other interactive objects have, but my favourite secrets by far were the little Doom action figures that play a chiptune-y snippet of E1M1’s music when you pick one up. The figures don’t unlock anything good themselves, but each of them is themed after a piece of id or Bethesda history — Quakeguy, Keenguy, Vaultguy etc. — and are honestly so adorable that I would unhesitatingly buy one if they existed in real life.

This is Doom’s biggest strength, I think; it’s not even trying to hide its origins. The gameplay is a fusion of the best of both retro and modern FPS styles, yes, and this provides a very strong frame on which to hang the game, but it’s helped along the way immeasurably by being stuffed chock-full of callbacks to the original games. It’s easy to jam in easter eggs, of course — this being a Bethesda game, there is of course the now-tiresome skeletal corpse with an arrow in the knee hidden in a cave in Hell somewhere — but the nice thing about Doom’s is that they are for the most part entirely natural. They feel like they’re done out of love for the original material rather than because they’re cynically trying to trigger players’ nostalgia glands. Importantly, Doom doesn’t really waste too much time trying to justify them, either; there’s a soupçon of effort made to tie the classic blue/yellow keycards into the world a little more naturally, but the transition to skulls in Hell is just presented to you as a fait accompli, and while there is some cursory blurb in the game’s Codex to try and explain the powerups they’re just plonked into levels rather unapologetically, because this is a Doom game and a Doom game should have the Berserk powerup. It’s Doom because it has Doom-ness infused into its very DNA, from the frequent musical references to classic tracks to the game providing something cool if you shoot the Icon of Sin in the head, again.

Flaws? Well, I’m not 100% sold on the Glory Kill system. Glory Kills were much-hyped prior to launch, and mechanically they do make sense and fit into the game flow; if you reduce an enemy to low health they glow orange and start staggering around, and this is your cue to Press F To Perform Glory Kill. A Glory Kill is a melee finisher that will cause an enemy to drop a small amount of health – unless you’re on low health, in which case they’ll drop enough health to refill your health bar to about halfway. Glory Kills therefore function as a good way to keep up the frenetic pace of Doom’s battles; if you get reduced to low health you don’t have to piss about playing cautiously or search around for a convenient medikit, you just punch out the nearest demon and watch health orbs fountain out of their corpse. The problem is that despite there being a large variety of Glory Kills in the game — you’ll trigger different ones depending on which body part you’re targeting — firing one that isn’t “Punch the demon in the face” is really, really difficult, even when you’re specifically trying to set one up for one of Doom’s many mission challenges. Because you’re only ever seeing one or two Glory Kills, and because you do them so much, they get boring really, really quickly. They don’t feel powerful in the same way that the Berserk melee kills do, where Doomguy literally rips Imps in half with his bare hands. And in a game like Doom anything that doesn’t feel powerful ends up being not all that much fun, really.

The other problem Doom has is that despite its admirable focus on frenetic, relentless action, it does unfortunately feel the need to shoehorn in some plot and some scripted events to placate the modern gamer. At first it seems like it’s parodying the need for every game to have an over-elaborate story, since as soon as Doomguy puts his armour on fifteen seconds into the game somebody calls him up on a terminal to spout Plot at him — and his response is to punch the terminal into oblivion before they’ve even got through a full sentence. Sadly this story-lite approach does soon give way to cutscenes where you’re staring at a screen while somebody monologues at you, and not only do these slow the game down unnecessarily, but they also actively interfere with the good parts of the game by occasionally locking the door behind you so that you can’t go back to earlier parts of the level. This is completely at odds with the secret-hunting half of Doom; you can replay any completed level with all your weapons and upgrades so it’s not an unforgivable sin, but it does strike me as an unnecessary one.  The story itself does have some amusing beats like the evil UAC being portrayed as Scientology But With Demons, but it’s absolutely not worth the drag effect it has on you actually getting shit done. The visuals are technically very accomplished – very crisp and detailed, and the engine is about a thousand times better optimised than whatever piece of crap is powering the CoD series these days¹ — however thanks to the game being set in just two locations it’s also rather bland. There’s a couple of moderately interesting environments towards the end, but mostly the palette is that of the reddish-browns of Mars or the brownish-browns of Hell; Wolfenstein very much has the edge here as it had some outstanding visual design to back up its gunplay. Doom does better gunplay, but its visuals are never really anything more than “okay”.

Still, these low points don’t come anywhere close to dragging Doom down. It’s far too fast and far too fun to be held back by the occasional missed beat. It’s a fantastic return to form for id Software that’s driven by a love of the series’ roots and a deft understanding of how to make those roots blossom into a sturdy, demonic Hell-oak of a game — a modern update of a retro concept that, by and large, manages to combine the best of both. Up until now I was happy to call Wolfenstein: TNO the best FPS of the last half-decade, but now that Doom exists and is good I’m not sure which is better. I might even be inclined to say that Doom edges it on the strength of its purity of design, flabby cutscenes aside; it’s too close to really call it, though, and making a game that is as good as Wolfenstein is still one hell of an achievement. Pun very definitely intended.

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